Pages

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Can Euthanasia Be Justified?

We are all going to die. I do not believe that there is any moral justification for the view that a person should never be allowed to choose the time and the place. It follows that if the circumstances make it impossible for a person to take their own life without assistance, then there will be cases where it is morally permissible for such assistance to be offered. It does not follow, however, that euthanasia is always justified provided that the decision is freely taken.

We need to think very carefully about the consequences that would arise if euthanasia were legally sanctioned. Would a healthy person be permitted to request euthanasia? Or would a committee of doctors decide whether the quality of a person's life was sufficiently impaired to justify the request? There will inevitably be cases where the request would not have been made, had the patient been able to afford certain expensive drugs. The committee, in granting the request, would be saying in effect, 'As you can't afford the treatment, we agree that you are better off dead.'

My intuition tells me that the scenario I have just described is totally unacceptable. I cannot justify that view with a philosophical argument, although I believe that many intuitions are widely shared. And there will be many other such scenarios.

It is quite possible that, when all the problem cases are taken into consideration, we shall find that it is impossible in practice to formulate a law permitting euthanasia that had adequate safeguards. The paradoxical conclusion is that what is sometimes morally permissible ought never to be legally permissible.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Inception: Can Reality be a Dream?

I thought about this subject after watching the movie ‘Inception’

The key to the answer is the recognition that the concepts "reality" and "dream [world]" refer to two distinctly different modes of experience. By the very nature of these two concepts, they cannot refer to the same thing. Therefore, the simple answer is "No". Reality cannot be a dream without seriously abusing the meaning of the two words. Movies, of course, are granted license to abuse the concepts for artistic purposes. But philosophers must take greater care.

We each experience these in two distinctly different modes. When experiencing life in one mode, we notice that things perceived are constant, persistent, consistent, and coherent. When experiencing life in the other mode, we notice that things perceived are dramatically less constant in form and character, often transient in existence, frequently mutually inconsistent both from thing to thing and across time, and far more frequently quite incoherent. One mode of experience draws the focus of our attention, is amenable to inquiry, and responsive to our reactions. The other mode of experience often drifts uncontrollably past our attention, is rarely subject to inquiry, and is often unresponsive to our reactions. On any scale of measure, the difference between the two modes of experience is dramatic and unmistakable whenever noticed. One of these modes of experience we call the "real word", the other we call the "dream world" (or hallucinations, or illusions).

Most of us spend most of our time experiencing life in the "real world" mode. Episodes spent in the "dream world", while they may seem quite real at the time, always end with a transition back to the "real world" mode of experience. Some people, for reasons as diverse as drugs to brain damage, spend more of their time in the "dream world". Some people, again for diverse reasons, lose the ability to notice the distinctly different character of two modes of experience, and are unable to distinguish their "real" experiences from their "dream" experiences.

The bottom line is that life is not a dream. The "real world", unlike the "dream world" possesses an unmistakably greater degree of constancy, consistency, and coherence. In the real world, elephants are huge, grey and don't fly. That remains true across time, and is consistent with all other information we have about the real world mode of experience. In the dream world, pink elephants can buzz around your head, and turn into green mice stomping on the roof of your house. The fact that sometimes a dream appears so real you can't tell the difference, does not alter the fact that you always wake up.

I look forward to your comments

Sunday, July 18, 2010

What is the Best Way of Organizing Ourselves Politically?

Aristotle, one of the greatest political thinkers of the Western tradition, declared that “man is by nature a political animal.” However, there is a tension between two forces which move us: morality and power. Is doing the politically prudent thing compatible with doing the moral thing? Aristotle, like Confucius much further east, believed in the continuity between moral character and political interests. And although he believed politics as well as morality to be based on knowledge, Plato held that engaging in politics requires much specialized training, and that only an educated and morally accomplished elite could achieve political competence. Niccolo Machiavelli finally drove a wedge between the unequal siblings of politics and virtue: A statesman should only be concerned with being powerful, not with being kind or good.

Why have politics at all? Given the many disadvantages which have accompanied political organization throughout history – such as oppression, conflict and unhappy compromises – would human relationships not acquire a more genuine and superior quality without the mechanisms of politics? The Chinese philosopher Laozi had early suggested that the best and most sustainable way for human beings to live together was in small communities with a minimum of political interference. Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed the ‘noble savage’ to be superior to humans formed by civilization. Several theories contrasting the ‘state of nature’ (a hypothetical state of affairs marked by the absence of politics) with political states, however, come to the conclusion that political structure is absolutely necessary for successful human flourishing. John Locke argued that only in a political state would private property be protected. While Locke stated that a government can only have powers over a person who implies or expresses consent, Thomas Hobbes believed that political power could be legitimately acquired by force as well as by consent. This conviction was based on the assumption that, due to human beings’ innate selfishness, a state of nature would be marked by “war of everyone against everyone.” It is therefore rational to accept the dominance of a powerful political leader, a ‘leviathan’, who can protect his subjects and uphold the law.

Since only very few of us find the prospect of an all powerful leviathan attractive, the question remains, which is the best way of organizing ourselves politically? The answer which seems most popular today took a long time to reemerge. But despite Plato’s warning that “democracy passes into despotism,” thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries enthusiastically engaged in debate on democracy. One of the most eloquent writers on the subject remains Rousseau, who believed that the ‘general will’ could best be addressed in a system of direct (rather than representative) democracy. However, Rousseau was pessimistic about the chances of implementing such an arrangement in society.

As we all know, this did not stop the spread of democratic ideals. And so we find Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French judge and liberal thinker, reporting on his one year visit to America that what repels him most about America is how little concern there is about tyranny. This tyranny he feared was that of the majority dominating minorities, a worry that Tocqueville shared with his friend John Stuart Mill. Mill wrote his ‘On Liberty’ as a reflection on how the autonomous space of the individual might be safeguarded from the domination of the majority.

With its inherent flaws, democracy is still the best way of organizing ourselves politically.

I look forward to your comments

Sunday, July 11, 2010

What is Our Mission in the World?

There are two assumptions that I can see underlying this question: that we do have a mission in the world; and that it is the sort of thing that we can discover.

Firstly, it can be argued that we do not have a mission in the world. Some argue that the world is ultimately meaningless, a chance occurrence, and that we are also creatures of chance, with no mission. The idea of a mission seems to imply that somebody or something has set the mission. If there is no such somebody (e.g. God) then there will be no mission.

This brings me to the second point. For a mission to be discovered, it would seem that it has to be there already, waiting for us to find it. But there is an alternative. We can set our own mission for ourselves. We invent it, not discover it. This makes more sense to me. I don't mean to say that we just make it up out of nothing. It arises out of our desires and aims, all in the communities in which we live. Social institutions, our upbringing, our chosen circles of friends and so on all come into play. Within this we can make choices about what is most important to us and those we care about, and this leads to us setting up our mission.

I look forward to your comments

Friday, July 2, 2010

Can You Be a Philosopher?

Can you be a philosopher? Perhaps the real question should be who is a philosopher, an easier answer — everyone! I suppose a philosopher is one who seeks to understand life, its meaning, its orientation, its end and the processes that we engage in our attempt to navigate our way through life. The philosopher seeks to understand where we have come from, how we got here, where we will end up. The great philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant etc., searched in their own way to explain what makes us 'tick' as humans, whether it was in the sphere of thought, the moral sphere, the human sphere. All of them offered their insights and perceptions into these great human issues. Ultimately, some philosophers search after meaning, and how to make that meaning applicable, others would say there is no meaning, others would say we cannot know anything, others would say it is possible for us to know everything. A philosopher is anyone who seeks to reflect on life and its meaning and the consequences of that meaning for the individual, the corporate body, society, the world. We all contemplate some, or all, of these questions during our lifetime.